25 Aug 2014

FMW 12c on the Cloud - Part 1: Prepare the Environment

Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c is out there. And now it bring the wonders of SOA/BPM quick start, where you can get you development environment setup in 4 clicks. However, at some stage everyone always needs to setup a server, so I've been taking a look at how to do that in the cloud.

This is the part 1 of of the tutorial on how to install and configure Fusion Middleware 12c on the Cloud.

Create the EC2 Instance

To create the EC2 instance, on the EC2 Console, click on "Launch Instance":

Now select the desired Operational System, here I'll be using the Amazon Linux:

The instance type defines how much CPUs, memory you have, and of course how much the instance will cost.

On the Instance Details configuration, you can choose how many instances of that type you need, what's the shutdown behaviour and a lot more. For a development environment the defaults are fine, just click "Next: Add Storage".

In the volume/storage configuration, you need to choose an appropriate disk for your environment:

In the Security Group configuration, make sure to create 2 new Inbound rules, one for port 7001 and one for port 7003:

For now its ok to just click "Review and Launch", review all the configurations and click "Launch Instance". We will come back to the EC2 console to change configurations regarding external access, the Security Group created by default only allows incoming traffic through the SSH port (22).

Now the EC2 instance will get created and started, eventually you'll see it in the EC2 Instances page, in the EC2 console:

Note: If this is your first time creating an EC2 instance, you will need to create an SSH key as well. Create and safely store it, you will need that to access the created instance.

Configure the EC2 Instance

Now that the instance is created, we need to configure it. First step is to connect to the server. To do that, we need to find the Public IP in the EC2 Console for that instance, once you have that connect to the instance through SSH using you private key:$ ssh -i <your key> ec2-user@<instance IP address>

Install all SO updates:$ sudo yum update

Next, we need to install a few packages we need to run X11 apps remotely (we will need that to install Fusion Middleware later):

$ sudo yum install xclock links unzip libXtst xorg-x11-xauth.x86_64

To use X11Forwarding you need a X11 server running in your host machine. In Windows you can use CygWin. I'm using a Mac, so I installed XQuartz and changed the configuration to allow external connections (X11 → Preferences → Security, there are two check boxes: disable the first, enable the second).

In order to test if the X11 forwarding is working fine, exit the previously opened SSH connection and now connect using the "-X" parameter:

$ ssh -i <your key> -X ec2-user@<instance IP address>

And run the "xclock" command, you should see the small clock in your screen:

Now, there is one last thing we need to get done before we can move on to installing Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c in this box, install the Oracle JDK. This is a good guide on how to do it.

As per Oracle documentation available at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf

"For the purposes of licensing Oracle programs in an Authorized Cloud Environment, customers are required to count each virtual core as equivalent to a physical core. This policy applies to all Oracle programs available on a processor metric."

As per Oracle documentation available at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf

"For the purposes of licensing Oracle programs in an Authorized Cloud Environment, customers are required to count each virtual core as equivalent to a physical core. This policy applies to all Oracle programs available on a processor metric."